In Review

In review

One No, Many Yeses: A Journey to the Heart of the Global Resistance Movement

Paul Kingsnorth, Simon & Schuster UK, 2003, $18.00 US (approx.:
not released in US. Order online through mcnallyrobinson.com or your
favorite Canadian independent bookstore)

Paul Kingsnorth is exactly the kind of troublemaker the world needs. An Oxford graduate who became deputy editor of The Ecologist,
Kingsnorth spent a year traveling the world to study the global
resistance movement. "What exactly was it?" he asked himself. "Where
had it come from? Did it have any substantial ideas beyond objecting to
the status quo?"

Kingsnorth's answer is part travelogue, part manifesto, and part record
of struggling people. He met Zapatistas in Mexico, an anarchist pie
throwing cooperative in America, hillsmen in Papua New Guinea, and the
"Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee," which illegally reconnects power
and water to townships in South Africa. He found "a new revolt of the
marginalized; a new storm gathering out there, beyond the radar screens
of the powerful."

Kingsnorth is a real activist, unafraid to face tear gas, police
harassment, and arrest. He understands that one cannot write a book
about struggle in the streets and in the fields from a comfy den. This
is part of what makes the book so readable. It has the narrative drive
of a travelogue, which may draw many readers to a subject too often
weighed down by theory.

Travel also enables Kingsnorth to look upon this subject from the
broadest perspective yet. While this is a movement united by its
dissent, Kingsnorth shows us it is spread across too many cultural
divides to be united in the manner of that dissent.

So what does unify this movement? "The commodification of everything
is an issue at the heart of the clash between the proponents of
globalization and those who resist it," he writes. "There are some
areas of life...that cannot and should not ever be privatized or
commodified."

This is what links Jose Bove, the French farmer who smashed the window
of his local McDonalds, with the Karnataka State Farmers' Association
in India who burn Monsanto's crops. Kingsnorth shows that this is not
just a fight against capitalism. It is a struggle for power, for the
control of our natural resources: our land, water, and seeds. Neither
is it a poorly-thought-out rebellion by a motley group of anarchists.
Constructive, sustainable solutions are at the heart of every protest.

One No, Many Yeses comes closer to defining the global
resistance movement than any book yet, and to conveying the enormous
passion, pain, and human warmth upon which this movement rests. There
is unlikely to be a more important book for the green movement released
this year.

-- Piers Moore Ede

A Land on Fire: The Environmental Consequences of the Southeast Asian Boom

James David Fahn, Westview Press, 2003, $27.50 list

What
the rest of the world has learned from America is the desire for
personal wealth and material comforts. What the rest of the world has
apparently not learned from watching America is that these pursuits,
without careful planning, generally lead to permanent environmental
damage.

Nowhere is this failure to learn from others' mistakes currently more
evident than in Southeast Asia. Developing nations there have
experienced alterations in both economic and social structure at an
incredible speed; this "growth," combined with a sorry lack of
foresight by both corporations and citizens, has resulted in an
intensely accelerated environmental decline. In A Land On Fire,
journalist James Fahn chronicles the devastating effects corporate and
personal greed have had in this part of the world. Focusing primarily
on Thailand, where he spent nearly 10 years as a correspondent at The Nation,
an English daily newspaper in Bangkok, Fahn covers a wide range of
environmental problems in such areas as transportation, oil
exploration, and agriculture.

While Fahn writes with a journalist's attention to detail and sources,
he extends beyond unbiased detachment. With an evident love and
appreciation for not only the country but also the culture and people,
Fahn brings compelling insight into the difficulties of meshing Western
values with Eastern culture, and will make you question the very root
of human interaction with nature.